


Covalent (Shades of Black)

by Ephemeral_Everlast



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-23
Updated: 2013-03-23
Packaged: 2017-12-06 04:54:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/731653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ephemeral_Everlast/pseuds/Ephemeral_Everlast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"There was something there, in the eyes of his lover, that he could not quite pinpoint; there was an answer if he dared to look in the blackness of the iris, the pupil expanding and contracting like a heartbeat. The answers of life, of beauty, of chaos until it soared up and disappeared higher than the heavens." </p>
<p>In which loose-ends are tied up, and humanity's problems might just be saved by a recovering - maybe-not-dying - engineer and his lover in more ways than one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Covalent (Shades of Black)

**Author's Note:**

> _A long time coming, this piece of mine. Dedicated to seizure7, who encouraged me every step of the way to continue writing for this glorious ship. Also, your muse inspires me to no end – thank you, Realms._
> 
> _A story within a story, first and foremost. An alternate situation, most certainly, one that has been knocking around in my mind almost since “The Avengers” first came out. It all branches out to my thought of wanting there to be more to Loki’s story than complete domination – and in this instance, there certainly is._
> 
> _This might tentatively be tied to a lengthier work later on that explores who Loki becomes and what Tony is forced to – at first – unwillingly share. This can be read as a stand-alone piece, most certainly however._

For a city that was always alive, it had never looked more barren of life than on this night. There was a shade of death that enveloped the shadows, smearing and smudging into all angles and corners of the neon-lights. Yellow dulled, red became arterial and carnal, the green-white dimmed in a way that he had never seen before. Even the waning moon was simply that, waning.

Of course, that could have been his own situation talking, cynicism residing in his life where there had once been far less than his current standpoint. The words of a dying man were not to be listened to, especially from the mind and mouth of the one spouting such harsh deprecation. 

Mortality, especially the lifelines that wavered, blowing itself to shards with a hint of breath, tended to be a bleak subject in the night, something far more sinister than what potentially inhabited the lightless land. Which was funny when you thought about it, because the city was always aglow, all twinkles and sleepless nights spent gazing past the sky-scrapers, looking up and out and wondering if there was more than this endless gloom. 

Normally, he would have said no, that there could only be so much humans could create for themselves before their own pitfalls and flaws hindered their ability to forge a new world for themselves. Normally, he would have pursed his lips while his shoulders jerked up in that little shrug that stated that he was both indifferent and oddly perplexed at how strange people could be, he who preferred the company of metal against fire and the soothing rote of his tools against his latest toy. Normally, he would have had some bitter, wise-ass retort at the ready – if not hundreds – prepared for the rebukes, the hostile glint in the eyes of those who he successfully managed to piss off, very ready for battle, because after all, he had the suit for it. 

Pondering late into the night was something Tony was surprisingly good at – that was when his best ideas came after all, when he was half-lucid and his mind was clogged with sleep and there was the tang of oil everywhere; that’s when the idea struck him, burning hot and red-orange, ready for his fingertips, a verbal command, even more added to the lists of inventions the world had always longed for but had been too busy biting their tongues to ask for. Ideas, those funny little things that never could go away, even if they were half-scrapped and prepared for immediate deletion in his trash receptacle. 

What he had meant before was that people always seemed to be frightened of the unknown, unnerved and ambivalent about everything at the wrong time and place when there was no need to be wondering about the meaning to life when they had to be up at five the following morning and there was no space necessary to do anything constructive with the thought. 

Harnessing the environment gave birth to many a tangible thing, whole devices that could – and probably had – level several towns in a row with the press of a big, shiny button. Tools necessary to bring the world to its knees, all locked up inside his mind, his brain firing away sometimes faster than he could put the thought into words. All those little synapses, determined to make what was there behind his eyes every-time he blinked a raw and working thing, ground into existence because of his will. 

He was god; he had thought himself as such for years. After all, weren’t gods worshiped, adored, and given precisely what they wanted when they wanted it, bestowed the tasty morsels of whatever people had to offer- sex, money, more mindless sex – at all times? Without even needing to ask, there it was, handed on a silver-platter, dripping with the juices of sweet fruits and candied thoughts; money could provide that, for it was no object. 

But, to provide a cure for the inevitable – that was something that his mind refused to come up with, no matter how many times he took his tools to his walls, no matter how many calculations he ran until the night bled into the day and he awoke to Pepper shaking his shoulder, asking him why he looked so sallow. 

Death; he could not stop for it, so it kindly stopped for him, or so the poem foretold, on and onwards, spiraling into the oblivion that he found at the bottom of his glass tumblers, revealing amber liquid and his hazed mind, glossing over until he found himself pleading inwardly, at sporadic times during the day. 

_‘Help me.’_ There was no help. _‘Please.’_ There was no one who listened. _‘I don’t want to die.’_ Tough, for it came to all things, including those who believed they had unlocked the secret to self-preservation. 

“Is it true?” There he was, melding seamlessly into the light of the room as if he had been there all along, watching in unfaltering sentience from the gilded ether of the 7:32 a.m sunlight of his window.  


Tony sat up, rubbing his eyes with the pads of his fingers, his bare foot knocking over a glass that he had fallen asleep cradling. Unresponsively he felt the trickle of blood run down his foot, smudging the sheets with his life – funny, for this was the bed where they had first…

A curl of tongue against the pallet of his mouth and the time it took not only to form a remark but to keep it at bay found the God of Mischief kneeling before him, taking his foot in his gloved hand, binding the cut with skilled fingers. 

“What, no magic this time?” Green-fires narrowed, a gold-banded forearm reached out to shove him backwards, his lower back hitting the mattress at an angle that made his muscles protest in agony. 

“Do you believe in sincere earnest that I would have let this stand if I had known? Have you such little faith in my abilities that you would keep silent about what was taking place beneath the flesh?” A gloved hand found his throat, portent and a flashback both to that window, that day before a series of events had taken place which made the very events of that day almost cease to never be; time could be bent but never broken and the sentences and words spoken could be erased, never to have been. At least in the eyes of those who had their memory washed, wiped clean of aliens and destruction and most importantly, of the very menacing, very capable creature who wanted far more than a throne. 

“Do you believe that I cannot save you? Is that it? You doubt my power?” The fingers stroked his jugular now, the act becoming something soothing, reassuring, hips settling over his own with a shift of fabric and murmured expletives of “Christ I missed you” and “I know.” 

“Nnnh- no. No. Never said that. Nothing can be done. Nothing at all.” A feral curl lined Loki’s mouth as he bent his face forward, all slashes of sun-touched skin and possibility that sent his blood coursing hot and thick in his veins. 

“Oh? Tell me, is your will to live that weak? Do you wish to have your empty carcass dropped unceremoniously into a hole in the ground, those who had never known you shedding false tears for a glimpse of fame for all eyes to see? Do you wish for your life to mean so little? Never did I know you to be one who gave up so easily.” The diatribe was layered in words of poison, inflaming his blood until he was certain he would die of having far-too much anger pumping in his valves; hadn’t the doctor said to take it easy while his arc reactor failed?

“The hell do you think you are? You think I haven’t tried? You think I haven’t considered every possibility, every outcome, everything that I could come up with? There is nothing, nothing that I can do, nothing that any doctor can do, nothing at all aside from letting myself die, maybe with a little dignity. If that doesn’t suit you, you can take your flashy-ass out of here right now.” Or, maybe he would die right here, strangled to death under the god’s weight, no matter if for every other syllable he uttered, he hitched his hips forward, eliciting a friction that made it very hard to breathe. Over-exertion could potentially speed up his symptoms, anything that would incense his…

“Did you ever consider the thought of perhaps, having someone outside of mortal limitations assist you in your aid for health? The elixir of youth, the ultimate prize for the taking –“ The god’s fingers gripped Tony’s hips, fingernails digging into the bone and flesh, hard enough to break the skin if he so desired. “Ask me; just ask _me_.”

Tony pressed himself as deep into his mattress as he could go, hands balling into fists around the sheets. “For some reason I’ll never fathom, you wanted me to know the events of Manhattan; didn’t you ever think I’d blab to anyone that “hey, the villain’s not really the villain, he’s on some sort-of self-discovery mission that required the events to take place, but then they were rewritten by his hand and there’s really nothing anyone can do about that ‘cause they can’t remember?”

“And did you? Did you wag your tongue to any listening ear?”

“No; I wanted to know why. Why all the secrecy and collusion, why all the smoke and mirrors? For what?”

“For me – that’s why. I am free to do as I please; I invoked something…ah, perhaps one day, you shall know.” Leather-encased fingers gripped his fists, smoothing them out until they were splayed, all shaking knuckles and trembling joints until their fingers were locked together, exposed and armor fashioned in what he could believe, was a binding of flesh-white and night-black.

That is if he was looking at anything other than the austere slant of green, brimming with desire for more than a slake of the appetite of the skin. There was something there, in the eyes of his lover, that he could not quite pinpoint; there was an answer if he dared to look in the blackness of the iris, the pupil expanding and contracting like a heartbeat. The answers of life, of beauty, of chaos until it soared up and disappeared higher than the heavens. 

“Help me. Please, help me.” Five words. No two-cents about how he needed to know what his motives were, how nice that clean-up had been, how much happier his brother seemed these days, blissful in his ignorance as to what had not taken place on Earth, nothing but those five words. 

A pulse. A pounding. A pressure, long and hard on his ribs. A trickle of blood that raced up his leg, disappearing as if by the assured touch of a lover, of _his_ lover. Healing, from deep within the stirring of his cells, a stirring that smoothed over, the roiling collision of blood against his flesh ceasing for a moment, his heart stopping its thump.

He was dead; or, so he believed he was dead. But if he were, then how had he suddenly opened his eyes, choking only to throw up the contents in his stomach over the side of the bed, sputtering against the stickiness that coated his teeth, the contrasting flavors against his gums?

“I-you-you and I…I’m gonna…I’m…kill you…gonna…” Vitality. Color and health, a blooming array of sights that wrapped him up, as if by the tenderness of a lover’s embrace, of _his_ lover. Life. To die, only to be reborn anew, to go against the fabric of reality – if there was such a thing – for one man. To raise the dead, to console a dying man until he was convinced that there were answers all around. 

He had been saved, he knew that answer as assuredly as he knew what would come of his end: unfinished business, time that had yet been unspent. A life, wasted; a life lived, from now on.  
“What did you do to me? What did you do?”

“I saved you- you are bound by my power, by what I have fought by tooth and claw to possess.”

“Which is?”

“Choice. The ability to dwell where not a one can see me, can know of my existence. I am a shadow, a specter, a ghost, the afterthought of a dream that dissipates with the rising of the sun. I am the in-between, a true god, without any standing, without any limitations. All but one.”

Well, that was certainly a strange way to go about rebelling, but there was nothing he could say to that. Manhattan had never happened, the Avengers had found themselves paired up eventually, and there was no destruction; nothing but his memories of what had taken place. 

“Why me? I hated you.” There was laughter, true laughter coming from the god’s mouth as he rolled off of him to the right, spreading out upon the mattress in the striped patterns of mid-morning sunlight.  
“Defiance was necessary- all of it was. Yours was a passion I had not seen in eons. I looked to you and thought, all through that masquerade of menace, that there is life within you, one that neither I nor the fabric of the universe could stunt.”

“All from one look, huh? What else were you looking at?” Whether this was shock talking or his insatiable curiosity talking to him he didn’t know, but that didn’t keep him from asking. 

“You, watching me. How you sized me up, how you noticed our height difference from the very start. The hurled barbs that were nary a blow to what was in store after the chains of my seeming demise were snapped shut upon my wrists and mouth. How intriguing it was that a man with such a big mouth seemed to have such heart; for it is usually that those with nothing to say are the ones who speak the most, those with little passion in their hearts for what matters most to them.”

There was a plan with him in it, one that had the attention of a god who destroyed Manhattan only to rebuild it again, for he had seen the strings fall from Loki’s wrists as time itself was bent, memories woven and energies settled, malice vanishing and gaps restored, echoing back into a reaching of the cosmos that he had always envisioned as this place filled with gold and gems. One with such power couldn’t be trusted, for there was a higher scheme, there had to be, aside from all this talk of understanding who he was and what he was capable of. 

And yet there wasn’t; wasn’t the god a testament to that?

“You killed me.” A nod, green eyes missing nothing. “To bring me back.” A second nod. “You saved my life for something- and it’s nothing to do with how good in bed we are?”

There was that laugh again, something that resounded in his ears, circling back and cracking over his head like the thunder his brother commanded; something all-encompassing, something beautiful, something that had been exhumed and rebuilt from one who could barely crack a smile without seething in his own self-derision. Before him was a creature who had, somehow, by the force of time and the universe and all the things he couldn’t understand figured out who he was. An ultimate chance to start again. 

“Yes, Anthony, it all depends on how excellent of a lover you are. Think of this as repayment in the highest way; never shall you be poisoned by your past folly again. Time is yours.”

Tony exhaled through his nose, rolling onto the god who, without a word of protest, gripped his backside with both of his hands. “Then let’s not waste it.”

Sometime later, in the sweat-mussed sheets of a cream-white bed, Anthony Edward Stark murmured his gratitude, and a God of Mischief replied that there could be no such thing as loose-ends. 

“Just admit you’d miss me if I was gone.”

“Perhaps – it would certainly be quieter.”

“You’d miss me.”

“I would grow bored with the endless silence.”

“You’d miss this.”

“Much would be amiss without the shared warmth.”

“You’d miss our love.” _Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit_. 

Loki turned his head from the left where he had been controlling the flow of dust motes from sunbeams, his hand lazily sliding beneath the covers to clench the meat of his inner-thigh, the word causing his fingers to sink into his knee before gliding up to his length, pressing applied weight there. 

“Aye. Indeed I would, Anthony.” 

There was a lot he didn’t understand; but when he was faced with a problem, there was nothing he could do aside from tussle with it until the pieces fell apart like puzzles, sinking into his palms as if all of the mysteries of the universe collided in a steady stream of turquoise light of his schematics. 

This was one of them.

“Anthony lifa endr – Anthony lives again.”

And live again he would. Not before he swore off the drinking again for the twentieth time and went back to clanging on his new projects, answering the worlds’ problems before bed-time. Only this time, he would not be sliding under the covers alone. Those who could take life tended to grant it more freely than they believed. 

The city, after that eventful morning, never looked more alive. Of course, that could have been his own situation talking, for a man who had everything tended to see the world differently.

_‘Can’t blame me for this one.’_

_...“And I always say, we should be together_

_And I can see below, 'cause there's something in here_

_And if you are gone, I will not belong here (belong, belong, belong)_

_And I started to hear it again_

_But this time it wasn't the end...”_


End file.
